I
have been reflecting since late last year on the spiritual meaning of the end
of the millenium.At first I
wasn't coming up with much.I was
intrigued by the ideas put forth by Jubilee 2000, a movement using the end of
the millenium as an opportunity for challenging developed nations to forgive
the crushing debts of poorer countries.Beyond that, most of the thoughts I had heard seemed to fall into the
category of "media hype" rather than serious reflection.

I
was carried deeper in this inward journey in an unexpected way.My wife and I received an invitation by
New Zealand Yearly Meeting to do six weeks of music ministry in that country
last winter.After flying for 13
hours across the Pacific, our New Zealand Quaker hostess arranged for us to
spend a few days at a retreat house built by Friends on an island across the
bay from Auckland.Amid family
preparations for a very different Christmas far from home, I discovered a stack
of back issues of the New Zealand Friend.I decided to skim through these as preparation for our work among
Friends there.

Jesus'
call to open prison doors.I came
across an extraordinary article in the November 1997 issue of this periodical
entitled, "Quakers, Jesus, & the Theology of Prison
Abolition".In this article,
Llewelyn Richards zeroed in on what was perhaps Jesus' first act of public
ministry, recorded in Luke 4:17-18.In this passage (long a favorite of mine) Jesus is asked to read from
the scripture during Sabbath services in his hometown synagogue in
Nazareth.He unrolls the scroll
from Isaiah 61:1-2 and reads: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce
pardon for prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind; to set free the
oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's amnesty."

This
last phrase is also translated as "the time of the God's favour" or
the "Jubilee Year". One translation has Jesus announcing that
"This is God's year to act!" Jesus then rolls up the scroll, hands it
back and states: "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
Although those present at the service are at first impressed by the authority
with which Jesus speaks, they quickly become angry at him. Luke says that Jesus
was fortunate to escape with his life.Richards went on to challenge Friends to use the ending millenium as an
opportunity to re-examine deeply our attitudes towards prisons and prisoners.

Reading
this article struck me deeply.What was Jesus talking about in announcing that the good news of Jubilee
was fulfilled that very day?I
knew that Jubilee had something to do with forgiveness and new beginnings.
Reading through Leviticus 25 I discovered that these rules were all based
firmly on the idea that everything and everyone belongs to God: the land, homes
and other property, wealth and the Hebrew people themselves. They were based on
the understanding that however far we stray from our roots in God, it is
critical that we return from time to time to our beginning state of belonging
to God.

Origins of
Jubilee in Hebrew Bible.This in turn spurred me to find out
more about what the Old Testament idea of Jubilee actually involved. What I
discovered (in reading through Leviticus 25) Jubilee were all based firmly on
the idea that everything
and everyone
belongs to God: the land, homes and other property, wealth and the Hebrew
people themselves. It said that however far we stray from our roots in God, it
is essential that we return from time to time to that beginning state of
belonging to God.

According to
Leviticus, every seven years was to be a Sabbath year.In this year all agricultural lands
were to be left fallow so that the land itself could experience the spiritual
and physical restoration of Sabbath rest.(You may have heard that there is great controversy today in Israel because
the Orthodox leaders of Judaism have decided to no longer endorse the loopholes
under which Jewish farmers went through paper transfers of their property to
non-Jews each seventh year.)The
earth is
the Lord's, not our own.It
deserves to be loved and cared for and rested and given spiritual renewal just
as we need to rest every week.This year, every year we need to love the land (and air and water and
all of God's creation) and care for it and allow it to flourish once again.

This status
as belonging to God extended down even to the very poorest individuals and
families whose desperate economic circumstances caused them to lose everything
they owned, leading them not only to sell away their family property or to
accumulate large debts, but even to the point of selling away their status as
free people and becoming slaves to their neighbors.

As a result,
every seven Sabbath years, a much more radical returning to beginnings was to
occur.Once every fifty years, all
outstanding debts were to be forgiven, all Hebrews who had the status of slaves
were to become free, and all properties that had been sold during the previous
fifty years were to be returned to the families that sold them.(How different U.S. - and New Zealand -
history would have been if all the broken treaties and shady land deals under
which indigenous people lost their lands were annulled every fifty years!)

It is unclear
to historians to what extent these radical principles were ever put into
practice in ancient Israel.To the
extent they were, they were applied to the Hebrew people alone. Land acquired
from non-Jews was presumably not returned. Nor were non-Jewish slaves or
prisoners set free.

Jesus and
Jubileeethic.It is also clear, however, that the very heart of Christ's
good news was to extend the basic principles of the Old Testament ethics beyond
the boundaries of the Hebrew community to the entire human race.No longer is Christ's message of
liberation and forgiveness limited to one's own extended family/faith
community.

When
Christ unrolled Isaiah in that synagogue 2000 years ago, it didn't fall on the
official Jubilee year of the Hebrew community (see Luke 4:14-30).What Christ was saying is: "This
is my challenge, my invitation to you right now, today!"In his promise to be with us always, to
the end of time, he challenges us to live this good news every year, not just
every 50th year or even every 1000th year. Here, at the very outset of his
ministry to this world, Jesus was saying:"What my messiahship is about is a radical new beginning, a fresh
start, a change that will turn the world upside down."Surely, this provided a key to what
this new millennium was about: far beyond the specific issue of forgiving Third
World debt!

Our
economic system does much good in creating things we treasure and rely upon. It
is hard to imagine the upheaval it would create in our economy and social life
if those old Jubilee rules (forgiveness of debts, reversal of property sales
back to original owners, leaving land fallow for a year, release of prisoners)
were put into effect today.But
our economic system also creates almost inconceivable inequities among us,
leaving some in enormous wealth and others in utter poverty.I hear Christ challenging us to
remember that every human being is a member of God's family and deserves to be
given a fresh chance to start over without crippling burdens from the past of
debt or lack of economic resources.How can Christ's good news extends even to those in prisons or in a
state of effective slavery (due to the economic, political, gender or ethnic
status they find themselves in) - to all of these he offers a fresh new
beginning to under His reign?

These
are powerful, disturbing messages.I recognize the fears in me of trying to put them into practice today.
If I listen to a call to prophetic witness to the society around us on these
issues, I could easily face the same hostility and resistance from today's
"powers that be" as Christ did in Nazareth.Closer to home, I know I have to face resistance to this
Jubilee message in my own heart.

Letting
go of attachment to material wealth today.When I returned from New Zealand I was laid off from my well-paying
secure (I thought!) job as a hospital administrator.I struggled with whether to rush into another job of this
kind.After prayer and discussion
it felt scary but right to try and cut way back on our family expenditures and
see if we could make it on my wife's much lower salary from a Friends
School.We decided we were not
really using the top floor of our large old farmhouse and found a college
student to rent it from us. It left us a bit cramped, but not nearly as cramped
as most families around the world.Annie (my wife) acknowledged ways in which she had come to use shopping
as recreation or even therapy and expressed readiness to find other
outlets.My six year old has
difficulty understanding why we are much less ready and able to buy him as many
of the toys he wants as before.I
threw myself into ways we could save money in my new unfamiliar role as primary
homemaker.But I too can easily
give way to spending money on non-essentials.And there are so many "things" we own that I am
attached to: it is hard to hold them up to Christ's challenge and know what is
right.

I
am also just beginning to recognize the need to move beyond these ways of
trying to alter my relationship with God's "imprisoned" children in
the inner city or across the world through economic changes. I am also trying
to practice radical reformation here within my family and in the ways I spend
my time each day. What does it mean for me to give all back to God, to make a
Jubilee new beginning in my daily life? To make a fresh Jubilee beginning in my
response to my son who struggles with an emotional and behavioral disability or
in my marriage?

I
struggle with ways to establish balance and rhythm in my day-to-day life as I
embrace each day as a new beginning in Christ. Our monthly meeting has always
been helpful in supporting us when we feel called to carry our ministry around
the world. It is harder to ask for help and support when we are struggling with
more mundane struggles, such as how to make ends meet or how to achieve peace
with God each day.We still have a
long way to go - and yet I know we have many partners available in this journey
to faithfulness.

Christ
invites us to start over each year as if we are all radically of equal value to
God, as we were when God first created us. Only by taking this challenge to
heart as a faith community and as a nation can we begin to find the courage and
vision to discover how we can respond to his invitation, this millennial year -
and every year to come.

(The
author spent seven weeks in late 1999 and early 2000 traveling with his wife
and family under a minute of religious concern from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
to Friends in New Zealand and Hawaii.A shorter version of this essay was printed in the January 2001 issue of
Quaker Life.)

Subscribe

Quote that speaks to me

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This
is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet
their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present,
because immortal. - William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude, 1702.

Note: This passage was quoted by J.K.Rowling as the epigraph of her novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It is as a "religion of life" that Quakerism will be presented in the future and is being presented now.

Its distinguishing note will be its resolve to bring all this human life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life.It
will stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the
sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of
nature, the sacrament from the days' common work, the clergy from the
laity.

It will tell of a Christian
experience that makes all life sacred and all days holy, all nature a
sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives to every man and woman in the
body fit place and service.Its concern will be to
multiply men and women who will have a message of power because they are
themselves the children of light.It will claim the whole
of man's life, and the whole of life, individual, social, national
international, for the dominion of the will of God.

Recent Entries

My wife, Phyllis Taylor, and I feel very fortunate to have been a small part of the freedom struggle that resulted in the independence of Bangladesh. I am very sorry to say that, during the war of independence, our own beloved country, the United States of America, was secretly sending military supplies to Pakistan which were used to kill and oppress citizens of what was then called East Pakistan. …

When our hearts are knit together in powerfully gathered waiting worship do we not enter into living water and drink deeply from it? What deeper spiritual refreshment could be available to us than this drawing on the living water that Christ offers us every time we gather with Friends to wait expectantly upon this gift? …

Who in your assemblies sometimes feel a testimony for the Lord to spring to your hearts, keep your watch in the light, that so none stay behind, nor run before. But let all that open their mouths in the assemblies of the Lord's people do it as the oracle of God in the arising of the eternal power. For nothing can beget to God but what comes from the word of life that lives & abides forever; and nothing can refresh, strengthen or comfort that which is begotten by the word of life but what springs from the same. …